NOTES FROM HERE AND THERE

Lewis Dolinsky

Published
4:00 am PST, Wednesday, December 23, 1998

NORTH KOREA TAKES A STEP INTO THE WORLD

When Americans think about North Korea, they think of missiles, isolation, threats against the South and starving millions, not about international arbitration and corporate law. But those two subjects brought 10 North Korean legal specialists to Beijing
University
the week of December 6-12. Classes went 9 to 5, and the North Koreans studied into the night. Some instructors were Chinese, but most were American, as was the man in charge,
Jerome A. Cohen
, a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations
in New York and a law professor at
New York University
who has also taught at Berkeley and Harvard.

Cohen suggested these sessions on Labor Day weekend last year, when he visited North Korea for the first time since 1972. Cohen went back to Pyongyang in May and July with representatives of multinationals (which he won't name). Cohen's law practice has clients that do business in Vietnam and China. He is interested in bringing socialist countries into the business world, which need not mean abandoning socialism, he says.

Certainly not in this case. In fact, if this week of classes (sponsored by NYU and the Asia Foundation in San Francisco) is characterized by Western media as a step toward capitalism, Cohen expects the North Koreans to pull back. They're sensitive (others say paranoid). They feel threatened (especially when the Pentagon talks of blowing them away). They don't like publicity; they expect it to be bad.

China and Vietnam have shown they can participate in international business without remaking themselves, but they needed to adopt rules, procedures and systems. An outsider wants to know whom he's dealing with. Is the enterprise state- owned, or not? Does it have assets and liabilities? Who is authorized to sign contracts? At these sessions, arbitration of business disputes was emphasized; next year, Cohen hopes to arrange a 10-day seminar on corporate law.

Until U.S. sanctions are lifted, Americans cannot invest in North Korea, and many European and Japanese firms do not want to be associated with a "rogue nation." But potential exists, though if not on the order of China. North Korea has gold, silver, zinc and other minerals that are in short supply outside its borders. It lacks capital for machinery and development, telecommunications, roads, air transportation and electricity. Opportunities in North Korea cannot be seized until it creates a legal structure that meshes with world standards.

Cohen says most news about North Koreans comes to us from the U.S. government. To understand them -- and vice versa -- "we need a broader range of contacts and of subject matter."

YESTERDAY'S HERO

East Berlin border guards were once lauded by the state. But history is rewritten -- and justice dispensed -- by the winners. Since reunification in 1990, nearly a hundred former guards have been convicted (and mostly given suspended sentences) for shooting citizens heading west. Rudolf Muller's case is a counter point: He's on trial in Berlin, accused of murdering a border guard who stood in the way of his family's escape.

Muller, now 67, left the East before the Berlin Wall was erected. He returned in 1962 after digging a tunnel, starting below the offices of a virulently anti-communist West German newspaper publisher. Before the Mullers passed safely through the tunnel, 20-year-old East German guard Reinhold Huhn was slain.

Each man was declared a hero by his own side. In the West, Huhn was said to have been accidentally shot by a fellow guard. In the East, Huhn was said to have been shot at close range by Muller while searching Muller's bag near Checkpoint Charlie. Prosecutors now believe the East German "propaganda."

At a press conference after the escape, under the influence of alcohol or joy, Muller let out that he had shot Huhn, but he gave the police the other version. Now, a witness has testified that she saw the action from a West Berlin highrise: She says Huhn was killed by a man who was not a soldier. Muller's new story is that he shot but that Huhn's gun was aimed at him. In 1962, Muller says, West German and U.S. authorities told him that it would be better for him (and probably them) if he did not say he had killed Huhn.

Muller was rescuing his family from a repressive regime, and he had reason to expect the worst if caught. But he may have killed before he was threatened. The court must decide -- 30 years later -- whether he had a choice and whether the ends justified the means.

THE BEST SCAMS

Reminiscing about the days when Russians could afford foreign goods, two Finnish businessmen told
Mark Atkinson
of the
London Guardian
about the ways Russians avoided taxes or import duties: 1) Finnish beer could be bought through an orphanage. 2) The biggest Russian importer of TV sets in 1995 was an association of the blind.